You’ve got Mail - Tips and tweaks to make Mail work for you

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Mac. A learning powerhouse.

We use mail everyday, all day long. We even have some relationships with clients and colleagues that exist solely on mail. Without a doubt, mail is a super important form of communication in our tech-savvy world. Apple Mail is quite versatile, filled with options and features. If you are one of those people who likes shortcuts and tweaks, here is a list of Apple Mail ones you are so going to love:

Keep track of those important mails

You know those emails you absolutely need to respond to, but you just can’t get to them right now? You can use the flag feature in Apple Mail to keep track of them. You can also combine this tip with smart mailboxes so that a mailbox shows only flagged messages. We’ll get to this one a little later. How to do it:

When in mail, click Message in toolbar > Mark > As Flagged

We all love Filters

You can find mails quickly in your mailbox by using filters to change which messages are shown. For example, you can apply a filter to show only unread messages or those with attachments— You can apply up to six filters. How to turn on filters :

Click the Filter button at the top of the message list > click Unread to show the list of available filters, then select one or more filters. A checkmark indicates a filter is active.

It’s important to note that, Mail will remember your filters and apply them to your next search. So it’s always a good idea to turn filters off when you’ve found what you’re looking for.

Hey Siri

Siri on your Mac makes it even easier to use Mail. You can send a quick email, have your one read to you, create a reminder to look at an email later, and even search for that email you need ASAP. How to do it:

“Hey Siri, send an email to Dave about our meeting minutes”

“Hey Siri, Read my email”

“Hey Siri, Remind me about this in an hour”

Get Smart with Mailboxes

A Smart Mailbox shows messages that are stored in other mailboxes and that meet certain criteria you specify. You can set your Smart Mailbox to include all the messages you receive about a specific project, no matter which which mailboxes the messages are stored in. How to do it:

To set up a Smart Mailbox: Choose Mailbox > New Smart Mailbox. Use the pop-up menus and text fields to define the criteria for the mailbox > click OK.

To display Smart Mailboxes: In the Mail sidebar, move the pointer over the Smart Mailboxes section > click Show. Mail provides a default Smart Mailbox named Today, which shows messages viewed during the current day.

To edit a Smart Mailbox: Select the Smart Mailbox in the Mail sidebar, choose Mailbox > Edit Smart Mailbox, then change the criteria.

If you use iCloud Drive, your Smart Mailboxes are available on your other Mac computers that have iCloud Drive turned on. Which makes it even more useful.

Forget the Spam

Some days it feels like the only mail we receive needs to belong in the trash. Good news is, you can set Apple Mail to sort this out for you. How to do it:

Open up Mail > go to the menu bar at the top of the screen > click Mail > select Preferences. This opens up a new window containing various settings for Mail > Click Junk Mail from the tabs along the top window. This to see the Junk Mail filter options. > Enable junk mail filtering.

Beneath this are other options that can tailor how the filtering system operates. These are broken into two main sections. The first is ‘When junk mail arrives’ and of the three settings available within we’d recommend choosing ‘Mark as junk mail, but leave it in my Inbox’.

The advantage this has over the ‘Move it to my Junk mailbox’ option is that when Mail receives any missives that it thinks might be junk, but is unsure, it will show them in your inbox, marking them in brown to indicate their potentially hazardous nature. When you open these items you’ll see a message along the top of the email that states ‘Mail thinks this message is Junk Mail’ and a button on the right side marked ‘Not Junk’. If the mail is a valid one that you want to receive then click the button and Mail will learn to let these kind of items through in the future. Any emails that fit the classic spam mould will be filtered out automatically.

We think you’ve spent enough time checking email for the day. It’s time to get back to business and randomly surfing the web or updating your Facebook status!